Note: This is a seattlepi.com reader blog. It is not written or edited by the P-I. The authors are solely responsible for content. E-mail us at newmedia@seattlepi.com if you consider a post inappropriate.

No bailout for the truth tellers

In a week when Congress was consumed by debate over the best way to spend hundreds of billions of dollars to revive the economy and bail out bankers, one ailing industry was being left to fend for itself: Newspapers.

Arguably, newspapers are as vital to American democracy as banks are to the American financial system. Yet the implosion of the news business is the most under-reported story amid the great flood of bad economic news. Still, the sad state of the business is on the minds of every journalist in this town.

Tuesday night, I attended the National Press Foundation’s 26th annual awards dinner. It was at the same event 10 years ago in the same ballroom at the Washington Hilton that I received my first major national prize, the Berryman Award for Cartoonist of the Year. That honor was the harbinger of even bigger things to come in my career, so I arrived in a wave of happy nostalgia.

Four hours later, I left depressed. The banquet had been more a wake than a celebration. Speaker after speaker talked about the crisis in American journalism, or more precisely, the crisis in the business model that has successfully supported American journalism until just the last few years. Leonard Downie, Jr., the former executive editor of the Washington Post, spoke about how happy he was that his career had spanned a golden age in journalism and how sad he was that the golden age was over. ABC news anchor Charlie Gibson said the person who will deserve all the awards in the future will be the guy who figures out a new way to make money delivering the news.

Seattle Times reporters David Heath and Hal Bernton were up at the front table to receive an award for a series of stories that documented the direct correlation between campaign contributions and legislation passed by Congress. When Heath got up to speak, he noted how, perhaps more than ever, regional newspapers like the Times (and, I would add, the Post-Intelligencer) are doing investigative journalism that has a national impact and, yet, those very newspapers are the most imperiled. I had talked with Heath at a VIP reception before the dinner where we commiserated about the state of the newspaper business in Seattle. My newspaper, of course, is unlikely to exist in print format by the end of March. Heath surprised me with his pessimistic view that the Times may not survive to the end of 2009.

As unthinkable as it may be, Seattle could soon become the first large American city with no metro daily rolling off the presses. If so, it is unlikely to be last. Metro dailies are struggling everywhere. In some cases, this situation has been exacerbated by the stupidity and avarice of newspaper owners. (Chief case in point: Chicago slum lord Sam Zell’s leveraged buyout of the Tribune Company which, in any sane economic system, would be considered a criminal act.) Most often though, it is the unexpectedly rapid decline in advertising revenue that is killing off newspapers.

Many newspapers have come and gone over the years, but, for most of the 20th century, it didn’t take a genius to make money in the news business. Publishers had a product that people were eager to read and, for advertisers who wanted to reach those people, newspapers were the only game in town. Annual profits of 25 percent and higher were typical at many publications and those profits paid for the kind of expensive enterprise reporting that didn’t necessarily sell newspapers but did keep watch on nefarious politicians, venal corporations, polluters of our environment and corrupters of our democracy.

Things began to change as newspaper readership declined and advertisers were lured away to the Internet. Everyone saw this happening and newspaper managers have been running in circles for the last decade trying to figure out what to do about it. What no one anticipated was the economic meltdown of 2008 that has now gotten everyone’s attention, from the halls of the capitol to the humblest American home. The onset of this recession knocked the newspaper industry from a precarious perch into a careening dive.

When I worked at the Hearst Newspapers Washington Bureau 13 years ago, we were housed in a fancy office a half block from the White House. Now, to save money, the bureau sublets a corner in the newsroom of the McClatchy Newspapers chain upstairs from Macy’s. Nevertheless, it’s a perfectly adequate working space and there’s plenty of good journalism still being done. In fact, some of the McClatchy reporters working across the room from me were part of a team that wrote a string of stories revealing the Bush administration’s case for war with Iraq was based on bad intelligence and an intentional effort to skew facts in order to justify an invasion. This reporting was produced at a time when the television networks were busy decorating their sets with red-white-and-blue graphics and the New York Times was buying into all the pro-war propaganda. Of course, because the reports didn’t come from one of the big shot news organizations, they were largely ignored. But, the fact is, the truth was being told for anyone who cared to pay attention.

The question we all now face is this: who will be the truth tellers in the future? Can the republic be protected by a cacophony of independent bloggers? Will online newspapers, if they come into being, have the resources to tackle the big, controversial and complex investigative stories? If metro newspapers and regional bureaus disappear, what new creation will arise, phoenix-like from the ashes of print journalism to take their place?

Oddly enough, this journalistic calamity comes just when the news matters more to Americans than ever. Every report about the stimulus package working its way through Congress and every story about job losses and mortgage foreclosures now touches each citizen of this country personally. It’s not about somebody else, it’s about you and me. Will you and I have money to retire? Will you and I have jobs next week or next year? Will our children be able to go to college or buy a house when the time comes? Will our 401k and our mutual funds be worthless?

Given the vastly enhanced power of government and large business entities to project a self-serving, sanitized version of the truth, the need for credible sources of information has never been greater. I’ve got to believe that necessity will compel an inspired response to the financial collapse now threatening to permanently cripple American journalism.

Note: This is a seattlepi.com reader blog. It is not written or edited by the P-I. The authors are solely responsible for content. E-mail us at newmedia@seattlepi.com if you consider a post inappropriate.